Posts Tagged ‘referees’

November 25, 2015 · 11:50 PM ET

Bucks coach Jason Kidd was ejected from Wednesday night’s game against the Kings and faces a likely discipline from the league, including the possibility of a suspension, after angrily slapping the ball out of the hands of a referee.

Kidd could be seen arguing with Zach Zarba and then, with a swing of his right arm, knocking the ball from Zarba with 1:49 left in the fourth quarter and the Bucks trailing 120-109 in Milwaukee. Kidd had to be restrained by players and assistant coaches before leaving the court.

The Kings won 129-113.

The incident comes two days after Hawks coach Mike Budenholzer was fined $25,000 for what the league ruled was incidental contact in bumping referee Ben Taylor.

April 17, 2015 · 7:17 PM ET

The new replay center helped reduce the time referees spent reviewing calls by approximately 50 percent, the NBA announced Friday after the first regular season with the facility in Secaucus, N.J., outfitted with 94 monitors sending images from all 29 arenas.

Among the statistics from the league:

The average review time was 42.1 seconds.

Of the 1,596 replays upheld or overturned, 80.8 percent were upheld and 19.2 percent were overturned.

There were an average of 1.76 reviews per game.

The most-common reasons to use the Replay Center were to determine whether a shot was for two points or three (623 times) and whether a shot was released before the end of a quarter (482).

Reducing the time spent on reviews was one of the primary factors in opening the Replay Center. While referees at the games still made the decisions, having league executives with experience as officials allowed the people manning the Secaucus facility to anticipate the reviews the referees would want to see.

Also Friday, the NBA announced it will include which referees made which calls as part of the play-by-play, effective immediately.

August 21, 2014 · 12:29 PM ET

After 39 seasons reffing games on NBA courts, Dick Bavetta is calling it a career. (Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE)

It was time for another family meeting, no different from the annual confabs they’d had for the previous half dozen years. Every Fourth of July weekend, at their log cabin retreat in the Adirondacks of upstate New York, Dick Bavetta would put the question to his wife Paulette and daughters Christine and Michele:

What d’ya think? One more season?

“We usually put it to a vote,” Bavetta said this week. “And I don’t get a vote. They basically listen to what I have to say and then they vote. The last six years, it’s always been 2-1 to go back. Christine, who’s like our Wall Street wizard, she’d always say, ‘Daddy, why are you subjecting yourself to all this travel and everything?’

“This year when we met, it was 3-0 to retire.”

Whoa. That result rocked Bavetta in his chair, the idea that after 39 years running the courts of the NBA as one of its most durable and most visible referees, Bavetta would be done. But after a record 2,635 consecutive regular-season games — a streak that earned Bavetta attention and kudos rare during most of his working years -– along with 270 playoff appearances and 27 Finals games, now seemed as good a time as any.

Season after season, Bavetta was out there, a familiar face to players, to coaches and to certain diehard fans around the league who, whether they realized it or not, had become familiar faces to him. This season, he won’t be.

April 10, 2014 · 9:07 PM ET

By Steve Aschburner, NBA.com

Granted, it’s not always satisfying when the NBA issues an officiating verdict the day after a disputed play. Learning 18 hours later that, yes, a foul should have been called on that final missed field-goal attempt in Team A’s 1-point loss doesn’t change the W-L records of the squads involved and rarely calms fans who felt their team got jobbed.

But transparency beats opacity, even after the fact, so the league regularly has tried to review, interpret and explain its many calls and non-calls ASAP. One way to do that now, with the playoffs approaching and stakes and emotions getting ever higher, is through a follow of @NBAOfficial on Twitter. That account will provide updates and clarifications on rules and fouls in the closest thing to real time, while educating some fans on what does or doesn’t constitute an instant-replay “trigger.”

The Twitter feed was one of the reminders Thursday to media folks in the league’s 2014 basketball & referee operations WebEx online meeting. A fleet of NBA executives provided updates and answered questions about the season and looming postseason, including “points of emphasis” that will remain high on referees’ radar as the playoffs unfold.

One thing fans might notice again this spring is a change that was initiated for the 2013 playoffs: Keeping referees together in the same crew to develop familiarity and continuity in their court coverage.

Traditionally, three referees come together pretty much randomly to officiate NBA games, compared to MLB umpires, who work most of the season in set four-man crews.

Vaden said that last spring, the league booked two referees as a tandem for each game, with the third official rotating through. “Ken Mauer and Ed Malloy worked every game together,” Vaden said, offering an example. “We’re more consistent in what we’re doing on the floor when we do that.”

This used to be standard procedure, Thorn recalled. “There was a time way back when crews were kept together,” he said. “There was a time when the same two referees refereed all the games in The Finals.”

In addition to the logical benefits of refs working together, Vaden mentioned some secondary ones off the floor in terms of reviews and communication.

“Keeping the guys together, traveling together, they can review more video of the games,” he said. “They’re easier for me to get a hold of than in the regular season. Even on off-days they’re together in the same hotels, so we can do a review from their last game and give them a preview of the game to come.”

The review process of referee performance has grown more thorough through the years, with a centralized group of eight reviewers in the office in New Jersey handling most of the heavy lifting. Teams also submit feedback, and the league has made it a priority to keep teams, players, coaches, media and fans in the loop with rulings and updated points of emphasis.

The selection process to work in, and advance through, the postseason is rigorous, Bantom said. From the regular-season pool of 62 referees, 32 are identified based on performance criteria to work the first round. That gets cut to 20 for the conference semifinals, 16 for the East and West finals and 12 assigned to The Finals. Guidelines in the playoffs include: no back-to-back games for officials, no more than three games worked in a week and, ideally, not reappearing in a series before Game 6 (loosened to Game 5 in The Finals).

Speaking about the NBA in general in 2013-14, with the transition from David Stern to Adam Silver in the commissioner’s office, VanDeWeghe said: “Our focus has been transparency and inclusion. We want to include more people in our discussions. Improve communications with teams, players, media and fans. We want to share more information and just the processes of what we go through. You can never tell where a great idea comes from, and we’d like to hear from you. This is our game together.”

The POE this postseason will largely be a continuation of those introduced back in October. Among them, Vaden spoke of:

Freedom of movement, including illegal screens.

Traveling calls, especially on the perimeter.

Point-of-contact plays, before, during and after shot attempts. “We have clarified the rule for teams, that if it affects the natural follow-through, even though the ball was released, we would penalize the defender,” Vaden said. “Hits on the elbow, we’ve gotten better at.”

Push or pull plays, physically redirecting an opponent.

Delay-of-game calls for handling the ball after it passes through the net. Said Vaden: “Everybody complained, but after about a month of the season, everybody’s running from the ball. The players have done a great job in adapting to this.”

Verticality. “It’s easy for us to call ‘A’ to ‘B’ movement,” Vaden said, referring to a defender who goes up in the air but not quite straight up. “As the season went on, we saw more of the defender turning in the air and [confronting the ball handler] with his side.” That’s a defensive foul too. But a scorer who wards off the defender with an arm, leads with a knee or elbow or even “displaces” the man so he cannot rebound can wind up with an offensive foul.

Borgia reminded participants that the NBA’s system of points and suspensions for flagrant fouls and technical fouls resets for the playoffs. The trigger numbers in the postseason are four points for flagrants, seven for technicals.

Several execs weighed in on “hand on the ball” interpretations, which came up again Tuesday on the final play of the Brooklyn-Miami game. That’s when LeBron James went up for what could have been a game-winning dunk, only to have the ball knocked loose – and his hand or wrist smacked, James complained – by Nets forward Mason Plumlee.

Plumlee was credited with a game-saving block and the league’s brass supported that call.

“Frame by frame, you can see that Plumlee got his hand on the ball before there was any contact hand-to-hand,” Thorn said. “That was basically LeBron’s hand coming forward and interlocking with Plumlee. A very, very close play. Very, very difficult to see. I think the refs did a great job in ascertaining what they did.”

Borgia attempted to simplify for the online audience what many folks don’t get quite right.

“If they hit a part of my hand or finger that is physically on the ball, that is considered hitting the ball and not a foul,” the referee-turned-supervisor said. “I think there is some misconception out there. … On a jump shot, most of the time the ball is more on your fingertips and not sitting in the palm of your hand. If someone hits the back of the hand, that would be a foul.”

Transparency, see. It might not alter a critic’s opinion of a call but it can aid in the understanding.

May 2, 2013 · 10:42 PM ET

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OAKLAND – Warriors coach Mark Jackson was fined $25,000 by the NBA on Thursday for comments that the league said were “an attempt to influence the officiating” after several statements in recent days about the physical play of the Nuggets in the first-round series.

He responded later in the day, about 90 minutes before tipoff of Game 6 at Oracle Arena, by saying he was “extremely thankful” he did not get disciplined for criticizing referees. The inference was clear: Jackson wanted it known he did not question the performance of the officials, but had to live with the ruling that his comments were a coach playing psychological games with referees, a ploy that doesn’t exactly make him a pioneer.

“I don’t like it,” he said of the decision. “And I disagree. And that’ll take care of itself. But at the end of the day, we’ve got a game at 7:30 and I’m excited about the opportunity that this team has in front of them. That’s the most important thing right now. We will not get sidetracked with anything that’s not on the track. We’ve got our blinders on and everything else will take care of itself.”

Jackson said he cannot remember being fined before, as a player or coach. When asked if he thinks he will get a fair whistle in Game 6 in the wake of the penalty, his replied:

April 2, 2013 · 2:59 PM ET

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More than a decade ago, Greg Willard got the sort of attention NBA referees traditionally abhor — and he wasn’t even working the game.

The Minnesota Timberwolves were on their way to getting ousted from the first round of the playoffs for the sixth time in as many years. This was back in 2002, in the best-of-five days, and the Wolves’ lone home game in the series against Dallas wasn’t half over when Minnesota coach Flip Saunders erupted. He had to be physically restrained by a pair of assistants from closing the gap on ref Bill Spooner.

Turns out, Spooner had dropped a line on Saunders that demonstrated he had Willard’s back. It wasn’t the first time, either — Steve Javie had said something similar to the Wolves’ coach in the aftermath of a snit Saunders had with Willard more than a month earlier.

Here’s the backstory: In a 112-80 blowout of Toronto on March 19, 2002, Willard made a remark as he ran past Saunders about Minnesota forward Sam Mitchell‘s 3-pointer in the final minute, possibly about the sportsmanship Mitchell showed or the trouble he could have incited. Saunders snapped back along the lines of, “I thought referees were supposed to ref games. I didn’t know they were supposed to give opinions.”

Let Saunders pick up the story:

“Since that time,” he said after the Wolves were bounced that day 11 years ago, “I’ve had two referees that, when I asked them about something, said, ‘I thought you didn’t want referees to give opinions.’ … I told them I thought that was total bull. First of all, my problem was not with them, it was with Greg Willard. To bring something like that up in the heat of the battle, I don’t know what you’re thinkin’. … They all talk.”

They surely do. The fraternity of NBA referees is a tight one, reaffirmed constantly by the rigors of their travel, the pressures inherent in their jobs and the guff they take while working from players, coaches and fans. Then there are their shared experiences, the close quarters of the refs’ dressing rooms throughout the league and the collegial respect that comes from knowing who’s good and, well, who’s still learning in a tough profession of split-second decisions.

Willard had that respect and more, not just from how he worked as a ref but how he endured his year-long battle with the pancreatic cancer that killed him Monday at age 54. He was one of the NBA’s senior officials, officiating nearly 1,500 regular-season games along and 136 more in the playoffs, two in The Finals and the 2006 All-Star Game. He achieved the best kind of status for someone in a competitive pursuit, the appreciation not only of his peers but most of those — those coaches and players — with whom he butted heads in the heat of their most intense moments.

Saunders and Willard made peace over their dispute soon after it happened and shared, in their respective roles, NBA courts for another 10 years. That sort of on-court silliness evaporated with the news last spring of Willard’s illness. It’s another example of that instant perspective, and life’s reminders, that none of us ought to need.

“Greg epitomized what it meant to be an NBA referee through dedication to his craft, hard work, and integrity both on-and-off the court,” said Lee Seham, general counsel for the National Basketball Referees Association, said in a statement Tuesday. “He was not only a great NBA Referee, but more importantly a wonderful person, and our thoughts and prayers are with his family during this difficult time.”

Longtime referee Greg Willard, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in June, had just taken the court and officiated the game even as his body showed the ravages of the pernicious disease.

The Lakers had already sent the game ball to the referees’ locker room. Several had shook Willard’s hand after the game. Bryant stopped by for a visit on his way out.

“He’s an extremely good ref,” Bryant said of Willard. “He doesn’t hold grudges. He just makes the call in front of him.

“Honestly, tonight I wanted him to T me up for old time’s sake. I didn’t want him to have any kind of special night. I wanted it to be just like it’s always been. I wanted to drop a couple F-bombs to him.

“I wanted it to be like how it’s always been. That’s the best way. “

All NBA game officials will wear wristbands or patches with Willard’s jersey number 57 for the balance of the season to honor his memory.

July 19, 2012 · 10:49 PM ET

LAS VEGAS – The Board of Governors on Thursday voted to expand the use of instant replay beginning this season and indicated that advertisements on jerseys, a revolutionary idea for the league, will be coming as soon as 2013-14.

The board – an owner from all 30 teams or someone on their behalf – approved replays on three fronts, without vote totals being released:

Referees will call “Flagrant” on the court and immediately use the courtside television screen to determine whether the foul was Flagrant 1, Flagrant 2 or actually a common foul. Previously, any changes were made following a review by the league office at least a day later.

Referees will use replays in the final two minutes of overtime and all overtime to verify block/charge fouls that involve whether a player is in the restricted area.

Referees will use replays in the final two minutes of regulation and all overtime to review goaltending calls. Non-calls will not be reviewed because that would require stopping play.

July 16, 2012 · 11:56 PM ET

LAS VEGAS – Two females are “top candidates” to become NBA referees in 2012-13, Joe Borgia, the vice president of referee operations, said Monday.

Lauren Holtkamp and Brenda Pantoja are both WNBA officials who worked the semifinals of the National Basketball Development League playoffs. If chosen for a partial schedule or the entire season, they would join veteran Violet Palmer as the only active female ref in the NBA.

“They’re top candidates,” Borgia said at summer league. “In fairness to the other refs, I can’t go any farther than that.”

A decision on the staff of approximately 60 officials is expected in early September. The number of openings is uncertain, although it is believed no one from the 2011-12 lineup has retired and that Bennett Salvatore, one of the top referees, will be returning after missing all last season with injuries.

May 16, 2011 · 7:03 PM ET

Here at the Hang Time hideout, we figure the names of referees who worked Game 1 of the Miami Heat-Chicago Bulls series at United Center are worth repeating once, twice or even thrice. They’ve got a few mentions coming because of how seldom their names came up during the game and broadcasts Sunday night.

Too often, hotly contested playoff games – especially at the level of conference championships and beyond – thrust the officials front and center in ways that the league and NBA fans generally abhor. But it happens, again and again, year after year:

Who’s working the game? Which team does he favor? How did three guys miss that call? Does he and that superstar have some sort of history? And on and on.

Considering the partisanship of most interested observers, the split-second decisions required several hundred times each game and the pseudo-celebrity status of NBA game officials thrust front-and-center into the spotlight right next to the players, the focus on refs – to the point of obsession – is understandable.

April 23, 2010 · 3:04 PM ET

Posted by Scott Howard-Cooper

OKLAHOMA CITY – A day after commissioner David Stern threatened to begin suspending coaches and players for criticizing referees, Lakers coach Phil Jackson, one of the main targets of the hard-line message, jabbed back at Stern but said he would probably tone down future comments.

“I think when you start throwing one- and two-game suspensions in the threats, I think that means a lot to both ball clubs and to coaches,” Jackson said Friday before Lakers practice at the Ford Center. “It seems awful heavy-handed to me, but David is one that isn’t shy about being heavy-handed.

“There’s a certain gamesmanship that goes on that he obviously he feels cheapens the game. It never was explained to us until it suddenly came down here this last week that arbitrarily they’re going to do this. I missed the coach’s meeting this last September, so maybe they explained it at the coach’s meetings last year because they said there were a couple instances last year where, I think, it was [Stan] Van Gundy and [Rick]Adelman were fined during the playoffs for statements that led to manipulating the press, I guess is the best way I can say it. I don’t know how you guys could be so naïve, being members of the Fifth Estate, Third Estate, Second Estate or whatever estate you’re members of.”

But when asked whether Stern should be fed up with what has become a steady stream of comments on the officiating, Jackson said: “I don’t think so. I think there’s a situation here that – favoritism on the NBA court, I don’t think anybody’s going to be deluded into thinking that people don’t gets calls on the court regardless of how you say it. It’s just a natural evolution of the game and a natural evolution of who gets the ball the most, and they’re going to end up a lot of times at the foul line. Unfortunately it didn’t work that way for Kobe [Bryant] last night but it did for Kevin [Durant]. But that’s the way things go in this game. You have to accept it, swallow it, and move on.”

Durant attempted 13 free throws Thursday and Bryant none, just after Stern said in a press conference before tipoff that “coaches should be quiet, because this is a good business that makes them good livings and supports a lot of families. And if they don’t like it, they should go get a job someplace else.” The commissioner later added, “And if someone wants to try me the rest of this playoffs, make my day.”

Bryant was asked about the discrepancy after the defeat that cut the Lakers lead to 2-1.